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Catulla Et Al

The poetic sequence which makes up the bulk of this collection is an original approach to the tradition of ‘creative adaptation’. These poems give a contemporary voice to the formal rhetorical demands of Latin neoteric poetry (which comprised a large part of the research for this collection), using the distinctive but mutually exclusive Catullan qualities of lyric plangency and bitter satire into an ambivalent and uneasy modern’ lovers’ discourse.’ These poems, which experiment both with both classical syllabic and more modern open forms, take place in an experimental but nonetheless accessible landscape which is palimpsest of ancient Rome and contemporary Aberystwyth. The collection as a whole stretches the lyric poem to accommodate irreconcilable frictions: embarrassment, for example, is a key emotional tone throughout (and is the subject of a critical work, “The Embarrassments of Poetry”, also submitted as part of this REF entry). This collection extends a concern in contemporary poetry (see, for example, Mandeville, by Matthew Francis, also in this REF entry) to destabilise the arguably tired mythology of the ‘individual poetic voice’ by engaging explicitly and playfully with voices from the past. It might also usefully be read as a co-text to Catullus and his more conventional translators, and is thus part of a growing debate about the role of creative adaptation in Classical Studies (as evidenced by the paper on Catulla delivered at Exeter University’s Women in the Classics Symposium, documented in the Contemporary Poetry Impact Case Study).